Quotes of the day

posted at 9:56 pm on September 14, 2012 by Allahpundit

The US consulate in Benghazi, where the US ambassador to Libya died in an attack on Tuesday, was not given the standard security contract offered to many American diplomatic missions in the Middle East, private military contractors have told the BBC…

Meanwhile the attackers appeared to know exactly where staff were being taken to and fired on a second building supposed to be a safe haven, prompting suspicions they had a prior informant inside the mission…

The State Department told reporters Friday afternoon that it won’t answer any more questions about the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate in Benghazi that killed four Americans until the investigation into the incident is complete…

All aspects of the attack, including what led up to it, its causes, the identity of the perpetrators, and the circumstances surrounding the death of Amb. Chris Stevens and the other three Americans, are off limits for reporters.

The new policy leaves many questions about the Benghazi attack unanswered, potentially for a long time, such as the identity of the attackers, whether they were connected to protests earlier in the day in Cairo, what were the exact circumstances and cause of Stevens’s death, whether the administration had indications of the threat beforehand, and whether the consulate’s security was adequate or not.

***

US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy is in ruins. Like no president before him, he tried to win over the Arab world. After some initial hesitation, he came out clearly on the side of the democratic revolutions. … In this context, he must accept the fact that he has snubbed old close allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian military. And now parts of the freed societies are turning against the country which helped bring them into being. Anti-Americanism in the Arab world has even increased to levels greater than in the Bush era. It’s a bitter outcome for Obama.”

Obama was naive to believe that one only needed to adopt a new tone and show more respect in order to dispel deep-seated reservations about the free world. In practice, the policies of the Obama administration in the region were not as naive as they may have seemed at times, and the Americans have always been much more involved in the Middle East than the passive Europeans. But Washington has provided the image of a distracted superpower in the process of decline to the societies there. This image of weakness is being exploited by Salafists and al-Qaida, who are active in North Africa from Somalia to Mali.

One thing is clear: If jihadists believe they can attack American installations and kill an ambassador on the anniversary of Sept. 11, then America’s deterrent power has declined considerably. For a superpower, it is not enough just to want to be loved. You have to scare the bad guys to keep them in check.

***

If one well-known Pakistani politician gets his way, international law will forbid “anti-Islam” material from the Internet.

I have defended the Obama administration against the complaints from the right that they have run an “apology tour” in the Middle East because I believe the US should admit when we make mistakes, such as the accidental burning of Korans. But what we shouldn’t do is affirm the wrongheaded view that people should be protected from the free speech of others.

Worse, our leaders shouldn’t let our enemies know that when they kill our people and attack our embassies that the US Government will act like a battered wife making excuses for her psychotic husband. Wake up: we weren’t attacked because of a movie made by an American. We were attacked because there are crazy religious fanatics who hate the United States. We didn’t ask for it…

Apparently our foreign policy is now being run by Dr. Phil. Someone needs to explain to the White House that our Constitution protects freedom of religion from government interference, not the protection from people who say mean, critical or offensive things about one’s religion…

It’s time for the Obama administration to stop blaming the victim.

***

Our response to anti-authoritarian movements has been confused. It varies from place to place. When the Iranians marched to protest a fraudulent election in 2009, Obama did nothing. When the Egyptians marched against Hosni Mubarak, an American ally, in 2011, the White House hemmed and hawed and finally threw its weight behind people power. Mubarak fell. What we neglected to notice was that the revolution in Egypt had not actually occurred. Other generals simply took over from Mubarak and tried to slow down the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood…

Egyptian politics have assumed a new and terrifying dynamic, with the Brotherhood attempting to triangulate between the Salafists who own the street and the Americans who provide economic and military assistance and debt relief. The casualties of this triangulation may include the peace treaty with Israel and the potential of Egyptian democracy. If the president has a plan to deal with this mess, we have yet to hear it…

This is the broken and anxiety-ridden world Barack Obama has made. Our adversaries are stronger. America and her allies are weaker. And yet, after spending practically a decade blaming every last thing, including the bad weather, on President Bush, the media seem determinedly uninterested in ascribing even the slightest amount of responsibility to President Obama.

Who’s ready for four more years?

***

TAPPER: Wouldn’t it seem logical that the anniversary of 9/11 would be a time that you would want to have extra security around diplomats and military posts?

CARNEY: Well, as you know, there — we are very vigilant around anniversaries like 9/11. The president is always briefed and brought up to speed on all the precautions being taken. But let’s be -

“If Mitt Romney had kept his mouth shut, if he had not acted like a rank amateur, if he had not embarrassed himself–and by the way internally the campaign understands they screwed up, he’s moved on, they know that. So no conservative can say “oh, the mainstream media, blah, blah.” They know how badly they screwed up, and they were having the fight internally before he even went out and did it. But Romney got in the way of the media looking at the president, going, wha-, wha-, what happened here? How did this happen? Now, those questions are going to be asked in the coming weeks. But they weren’t asked in the first 24 hours because Romney was holding this horrific, irresponsible, press conference.”

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